When it comes to Google Places SEO, it is very important that you make it easy to find the content on your website for both search engines and for humans. To achieve this, you need your website to be very organized and there should be plenty of links from your homepage to your content pages and from your content pages back to your homepage. You should never have an abandoned page, which is a content page that contains no links.
When you are linking from one of your pages to another, you should always use anchor text. Anchor text is simply one of the keywords or keyword phrases that are used on the page that the link will take the user to. As an example, if you are creating a link to a page that has a primary keyword phrase of “Indianapolis Surgeons,” your anchor text should be Indianapolis Surgeons, not “click here.”
Optimizing Your Website with KML Files and Sitemaps
XML and HTML Sitemaps
The name pretty much says it all, but a sitemap is a chart or map of your business’s website. When it comes to sitemaps, there are two kinds. An HTML sitemap is basically for humans, and an XML sitemap is what search engines use. Although they are not used as much anymore, HTML sitemaps are still a good idea because they provide a helpful outline of your business’s website and contain links to all of the pages that are included in the website.
An XML sitemap is absolutely imperative. They are of a much more technical nature and are specifically designed for search engines to work off of, unlike the HTML sitemap which can be used by people. Your XML sitemap can be linked in the footer of your website, but you should also submit it to all of the most commonly used search engines. When you submit your XML sitemap to the search engines, they will “see” any new content that you add to your website and get it indexed much more quickly. This faster indexing can also speed up the time it takes to see the results of your Google Places SEO efforts.
Google GEO Sitemaps
Google Geo Sitemaps make it possible for you to publish Geo content to Google and make it capable of being searched in Google Maps and in Google Earth. Using Google Geo Sitemaps allows you to speed up the process of getting your business location to show up in Google Maps and Google Earth because you are basically telling Google’s computers about your Geo content instead of waiting until it is found by Google’s computers.
KML Files
The file format that is used to show geographic data on maps like Bing Maps and Google Maps is referred to as KML, which mean Key Hole Markup Language. This type of file can be created to point out and sync your business’s location on online maps.
